Chapter Text
I thought it would be useful (for me) to write a meta on how I wrote this so I'll remember it later. Author’s notes. A few of you I’ve spoken to have seemed interested, so I'm putting them online.
If you’re not a writer or someone who can get obsessed with research, you might not find this very interesting. (You might not find it interesting even if you are. This is from the POV of someone who is learning writing as they go, and these observations could be very obvious to anyone with a background in writing.) Anyway, that caveat aside, here you go.
I wrote the original story, The DI and the Spy, from a three-word prompt: “Greg runs. Rom-com.”
MystradeDoodles (now KowabungaDoodles) came up with it during one of her Livestream sessions. It later got expanded into: “Non-established fic. Greg likes to run in the early morning. The very early morning. Perfect Romcom fodder. Sweaty sexy Greg in the morning excuse.” And really, who could resist an excuse to write sweaty, sexy Greg? I know I couldn’t.
There was some sort of vaguely-defined challenge which involved a deadline and a 10,000 word minimum. It seemed like an awful lot of words.
I don’t remember how long it took me to write it, but I do remember that it flowed. (I also remember pushing like mad to make the deadline.) To be honest, I don’t remember much of anything about the writing process. I knew Mycroft would end up spying on Greg, because—well—he’s Mycroft. But I didn’t want Greg to be the oblivious recipient; I wanted him to do some observing of his own. Greg’s a detective. He notices things. Things like people watching him from windows. Sexy people. Sorry—if you’re reading this, you probably already know the storyline!
I’d stayed in a hotel on Cromwell Road on a previous trip to London. The ‘Irene Adler’-style townhouses left a huge impression, and when it came time to locate Mycroft’s flat, it seemed like an obvious choice. I had vague grasp of the area from my visit, but most of my ‘research’ was (and is) done with Google Maps “Street View”. Bing’s “Bird’s Eye View” is also helpful—it shows a slanted angle that sometimes reveals more information about the buildings than ground level or straight-down imagery. So that gave me the original location.
I wasn’t a great authority on running. I’d run a little in the past, but it had been a few years. I wasn’t thinking closely about pace times and working backwards to make sure all the timings lined up properly. Someone called me out on that in the comments - on one morning his pace/mile makes no sense if you’re reading closely. I was mortified. For all my research into the location, I’d screwed up something really basic. It was a good lesson: if you’re going to give details, back them up and make sure they’re logical.
I wasn’t compulsive with research for that story. I knew where Mycroft lived. I knew Greg lived ‘a couple miles’ away. (Enough for the timing to work out for when he passed Mycroft’s house.) I knew Mycroft could walk to Kensington Gardens and sit in the park. I knew his house had a bay window where he could sit and eat breakfast (and watch Greg). It’s probably for the best that I didn’t try and get any more detailed than that, or I never would have finished it. (That might not be true, but it would have taken me longer.)
I had a blast writing it. I love writing humour. I grew up reading Douglas Adams and I am always happiest when I can make people laugh with my writing. I wasn’t trying to write porn for a change, just a cheesy romantic comedy. Awkward humour is gold as far as I’m concerned.
I never, ever thought I’d write a sequel.
Some people had asked for one, and I even wrote a few hundred words of something godawful that remains in a “burn this” folder somewhere. I decided the original was a standalone story—they’d got together, after all—and left it at that.
About a month later, I decided to give podfic a try. Not being one to start out small, I chose this story. As it turns out, it was the longest one I ever made (at 1 hour 15 minutes). I never expected it to be so well-received, but I still get people randomly telling me, “Oh, I listen to this all the time.” It blows me away, because I don’t really listen to podfic and never considered the replay value.
Then, I thought, it was really done. I mean, what else would I do with it?
And then Season Three happened. More to the point, Mycroft running on a treadmill in The Sign of Three happened. When I saw that, I nearly fell out of my chair. My first thought was “Oh my god, he took Greg up on those running lessons!” Some people wrote to me asking if I was going to write a sequel. I seriously started to consider it. I started writing it on February 14, 2014 - Valentine’s Day. (Awww.) It wasn’t a conscious decision about the date, and the only reason I know this is that it’s date-stamped on my Scrivener files.
[There are major spoilers below this, so if you haven’t read the story yet, you shouldn’t read any further!]
So, as soon as I started writing this, I hit the proverbial wall of writer’s block. What would I write about? They’ve met, and Mycroft takes Greg up on the offer of running lessons. Okay, great. Where’s the interest in that? There needed to be something more compelling. It was obviously going to be a “developing relationship” story, so there was some material there. I couldn’t have them just going out and running every day—that would have been about as interesting as watching paint dry.
I considered going with the “class differences” trope, and I did to an extent, but I feel like it’s been done to death and I didn’t want it to completely centre on that. I toyed with the idea of having Mycroft teach Greg something equally out of Greg’s scope of knowledge (perhaps horseback riding or fencing or something), and dismissed that idea as horrible and awkward. (The writing process is not magical. Trust me.) I had no idea how to move the story along.
The only thing I knew was that they were getting together. They were going on a date. I’m not one to plan out stories—I’m more of a “pantser”—someone who writes by the seat of their (American) pants and hopes for the best. It’s a writing term; people are “plotters” or “pantsers”. I think it’s a horrible term, but there you are. I always want to plot things out but it just doesn’t always work for me. So, I started writing without any real direction.
What resources do I have to work with? Insecure Mycroft, slightly insecure Greg, and two guys who haven’t been in the dating pool for a good ten years. That’s got to be awkward, right? Okay, awkward first date. I can work with that. Put it in an awkward location—Mycroft will never have been in a Starbucks, and I’d already introduced the Starbucks in the first story. Now I have the setting for their first date.
I start writing. The first date stuff flows pretty well. I start writing the second date and the running shop. I’m writing another Mystrade story at the same time, one that still hasn’t (and might never) see the light of day. It gets confusing for me as the AUs get mixed together in my head. I’m about 10,000 words into each of them (which is a lot of effort) and I decide that I’m going to work on this story exclusively.
[Seriously, I wasn’t kidding about the spoilers. Quit now if you haven’t read it and don’t want to be surprised.]
I still didn’t have a good plot. Fluff, fluff, fluff. Sex? Yes. Some plot about first dates and developing relationships? Yes. Something meaty to hang everything from? No.
They always say to “Put your characters through hell.” “Make them suffer.” “No one likes to read about everything going right all the time.” (I actually disagree with the last point. In fanfic especially, sometimes you do want to read that, because happy fluff is a good antidote for real world stress. It might not get you published in the world of original fiction but there is a definite place for it in fanfic. Anyway, I digress.) For a long-form fic, which this was turning out to be, I did want some sort of conflict.
An aside about story length: I never intended the story to turn out this long. At first, I expected it to be about 20-25,000 words. Then it passed that, and I thought, “perhaps 35,000 at most”. Then 45,000. It kept going up. At some point, I stopped worrying about it and just went with it. Some people enjoy long-fic!
I don’t remember when I came up with the idea for the fire. For some reason, I think I’d just got out of the shower or something equally mundane like that. Most of my “thinking” about the story and the plot takes place as often during my day-to-day activities as it does when I sit down to write. Car rides to do the shopping are a great source of ideas for me. I call it “side thinking”—pondering a problem in the background while you’re doing something that requires your immediate attention (like driving). If I’m stuck on something, I’ll often go off and do something mundane to see if that unsticks me. A lot of the time, it does.
I guess my point is that I spend an awful lot of time living in the AU, processing it in my head, deciding what the characters will do in any given situation, or just how they react to the world in general. How is it that Mycroft is so awkward socially while so adept at his job? What is the backstory for his previous relationships? What about Greg’s backstory? How do they react with the other people in their social circles? Sometimes these things don’t make it into the story, but often times they do. These are the random things I think about when I’m going about the rest of my life, and I think they’re vital to coming up with a coherent, believable world. (This is also why I find it hard to work on more than one thing at a time. It’s hard to immerse yourself in more than one world at a time.)
So: the fire. What happens if one of the character’s worlds is literally destroyed? What does that do to a relationship? Initially I wrote it so that they both escaped the fire and “gosh, wasn’t that lucky, no one got hurt.” I worked down that line of thinking for quite a few thousand words—a quick trip to the hospital to get checked out, and now they have to deal with Mycroft’s burnt-out flat but not much else. Perhaps he moves in with Greg. Hilarity ensues. Something nagged at me. Nope. It was too easy. What if it wasn’t that easy?
Having Mycroft get injured in the fire was difficult for me to write. I don’t like to deliberately hurt my characters. I find it emotionally traumatic to write and it’s something I prefer not to do. Still, I’d decided to do it, and I was going to suck it up and do it. I trashed the few thousand words I’d written about them getting out okay and started rewriting it so they didn’t.
I’d already started doing research into locations—I’ll talk about that elsewhere—but I had to find the closest hospital to Mycroft’s house. I started reading up on smoke inhalation articles in medical journals online to find out how it’s treated. I freely admit that how I portray it in the story isn’t exactly how it’s treated in real life. There are complications that can occur more than a day later, and they probably wouldn’t have let Greg go the same day. Still, call it poetic licence or however you want to put it; the fundamentals are there.
Do your research; make it real to yourself before you write about it. You can’t convince the reader of something if you don’t know what you’re talking about at a basic level. I actually went back after the fact and took out a lot of the details I’d written in (about the treatment of smoke inhalation, the detailed locations of minor settings, and lots of other small things that no one really cares about).
There’s such a thing as being too detailed to the point where the reader doesn’t care. Do they want to know exactly what sort of medicine is being used or how it’s being administered? Probably not. Not unless it’s relevant to the story somehow. It’s the same thing with outlining the precise details of Greg’s running route: just because I know it, it doesn’t mean the readers will want to read exactly how to reproduce it (not in the story, at least)!
All that being said, you’ll probably get at least one reader who does know about the details and might call you out on it in the comments. Don’t let it get to you.
Since the beginning of the hospital part is written (quite necessarily) from Greg’s point of view, I put myself in his shoes at first. What would it be like to survive a fire? Not just emotionally, but logistically? That was an eye-opener. No keys, no wallet, no clothes, no shoes, no phone. Everything you take for granted is gone. You are completely reliant on other people for help. What if some of those people don’t want to help you? What if you don’t want them to help you?
It’s worth noting that the subplot about Janice and her homophobia didn’t occur to me until much later. Originally I had Sally come and pick him up (quite happily and with no consequences). When I later wrote about Janice, I realised this was a great way to introduce her and her issues with Greg. Weaving that in as a subplot, and a few other things like this, I was very glad that I wasn’t publishing it serially. If I’d been publishing as I went—which I’d done with almost all my stories up until this point—I’d have been in a world of hurt with regards to plot and character development.
My writing process is simple: get to know your characters; place them in a situation; see what they do; write about it. By this point, I’d been working on the story for quite some time—more than a month. I’d been living in the character’s heads for a while. I’d (finally) found a juicy situation with the fire, now I could just react and write about it. Putting characters in a really foreign situation like that does a lot to crystallise things. Greg found out how much he cared for Mycroft already. Mycroft found how much he needed Greg for emotional support. These things deepened the characters and gave me even more to work with.
I’m not going to go through every plot point here, just in case you’re worried! But it was at this point that I started thinking about character growth as well as plot arc. I don’t have a background in writing, and these are things I’m still learning and picking up from articles I reblog on tumblr. But I started to consider ‘character questions’. What flaws did Mycroft have and how did he need to grow? What about Greg? What obstacles stood in their way in their relationship? Well, now I had a pretty big obstacle: Mycroft was stuck in the hospital.
They say “Write what you know.” Real life can be a resource for stories. A friend of mine was in a bad marriage and she’d finally decided to tell her husband she wanted a divorce. The day she planned on telling him, he was in a car accident that required about a month of recuperation at home. She didn’t feel it was appropriate to tell him that she wanted a divorce on the heels of that, and so she waited for almost a year, until he was fully healed. Now, obviously that doesn’t happen here—Greg isn’t visiting Mycroft out of a sense of duty—but certainly Mycroft would wonder if that is the case. What sort of strain would a medical event put on a brand new relationship? It’s an interesting mental exercise and an interesting topic. At least it was to me.
What about subplots? It’s really easy for me to get caught up in the main plot and forget to tie it into anything else. The only real subplot I have going on is the one with Janice. However, there are minor things like Mycroft’s past relationship and how that affects his interactions with Sherlock regarding Greg. Mycroft’s interactions with his parents—especially in a hospital setting where you can’t “escape” from prolonged interaction—became an issue worth writing about. Minor characters, and how your characters relate to them, are key to fleshing out your story. I had already written about Janice and Katie in another story (Cranes), set about five years after this. I wrote that while I was working on this story, and the events there had a direct influence on her actions (mainly answering the question, “why is she so cold towards Mycroft in that story?”)
So, I’d had the fire. I’d had some happy fluff. What did I need now? More conflict. It’s difficult to write conflict into characters you feel are so well-matched, so sometimes you have to manufacture it. The class/money issue, as I mentioned before, is a well-used trope—and not without reason. I decided to use Greg’s issues with money to motivate the drunk-call and the emotional fallout. Another very difficult sequence to write, as was the third conflict—Greg’s showdown with Janice. It’s hard for me to write angst, but it has to be done.
Mycroft’s introverted nature provided another plot point. As an introvert, dealing with extroverts is an issue I’ve always found fascinating.
The running. This story—at least the first one—had been motivated by the running element. I obviously wanted to continue that theme in this story, but it wasn’t easy with part of the story set in a hospital and Mycroft unable to exert himself in any real way. This was another case where I went back and wove things into the story after I’d written the first draft, mostly concerning Greg’s own use of running as a means of stress relief. The later training they did fell in quite naturally. When it came time to do the ending, I really started getting nervous. I hate endings. I suck at endings. They always strike me as such a letdown and incredibly boring, and perhaps that’s why I enjoy writing never-ending serials so much. I have way too much of a tendency towards “and they all cuddled on the bed”. My original thought on the ending had been “wedding” or “honeymoon” or “sex on Mycroft’s plane” (something I still wonder if I should have included). But then, in another episode of side-thinking, I realised I could make the ending sound like they were preparing for a wedding when they were actually preparing for Mycroft’s first competitive run. It might not be as clever as I’d like to think, but I was very pleased with myself at the time. It ties into the larger theme of the story and still gives the reader a bit of a surprise, I hope.
Locations, or “Why I am an obsessive weirdo.”
(Although I prefer the term ‘thorough’.)
As I wrote this, I came up with specific locations for every place in the story. Really specific. I’m not just talking about “Mycroft moved to a house near Kensington Gardens.” I mean when I visited London in August, I went and saw it—the specific house I’d found online and used (mentally) in my story. Same with Greg’s flat, Mycroft’s old house, Greg’s Starbucks, his original running route, the route they took when they walked from the Starbucks to Mycroft’s flat on their first date, even Janice’s house … you get the idea.
This might be a bit obsessive (well, especially visiting the locations in person after the story is already written!), but it allows me to visualise the story. It also makes for accurate timings. (How long would it take Janice to get to Kensington, for example?)
I started out with my only known quantity: where Mycroft lived. I decided their first date from the Starbucks would be about a half an hour’s walk—about two miles or so at a reasonable pace. I searched for some locations within two miles of Mycroft’s flat and checked the estate agents’ listings online to find out what types and price ranges of rental properties were available. They also have handy floorplans for their listings—more good visualisation materials.
Greg started out with a place in Hammersmith (too commercial of an area from what I could tell online) and quickly moved to Shepherd’s Bush. He had a place in a dingy high-rise for a while, until someone on tumblr pointed out that he’d be making a decent living as a DI, at which point he moved to a nice, quiet street of row houses. (There was a place on the market here—a ground level flat with a floor plan online! A gold mine of information.) He stayed there for quite a while, until it became obvious that the Starbucks was too far away and too out of the way to pop in to after a run. Damn. Poor Greg, moving again, this time to the other side of Shepherd’s Bush Common where he could be more logically located near a Starbucks. But my god, there was a lot of construction, and traffic, and it generally wasn’t a fun place to be running. Nope. Greg needed to move again. Happily, Holland Park was just down the road. I will freely admit that my choices of location were narrowed down by the Starbucks locations. Then, if the timing worked, I’d start searching that area for valid houses/flats. I found two options in Holland Park, both near the Starbucks, which happened to be right next to the Holland Park tube station. I’d found Greg’s flat. (Sort of. It took me ages to decide which one was “actually” going to be the flat between the two choices.)
What’s important to note here is that none of this really mattered for the story (at least not then). Greg’s flat didn’t change anything about their first date or the walk back to Mycroft’s flat. It would have changed things much later when Mycroft gets his new house; Greg would have had much farther to run to include Mycroft on his route. Thankfully, by the time I got to that part of the story, he was happily (mentally) ensconced in Holland Park. Extensive “wandering” in Google Street View confirmed my choice of location. (Extensive wandering in person when I visited later made me insanely happy—it was perfect!)
Why do I bother? I’m not sure. Could I make the story as believable without knowing exactly where everyone lives and what sort of traffic is on the running route? Maybe. Is it as real for me? No. I like (and need) a place to be fully formed in my mind in order to write about it easily. This is another situation where I took a lot of detail out after the fact: specific locations and tube stations and roads aren’t relevant to the story. Most readers will never go to these places and won’t care if Greg has to change from the District Line to the Central Line to get from Mycroft’s new house to his flat.
Visiting the places in person—especially around New Scotland Yard—did actually inspire some rewrites/polishing. There’s a small park near the Met that’s perfect for having lunch. In London, there’s a 20% tax on eating food inside restaurants/cafes, which means most people get their lunch as takeaway and eat in the park. It made it the perfect spot for Greg and Mycroft to sit. The pub where I originally had them meet Sally was far too long of a walk—I didn’t want to go there on the hot day I visited. They ‘went’ to the pub right next to the park instead. A trip to the real-life running shop made me realise it was literally a few blocks from the Met—certainly nothing Greg would take the tube for (as he had originally)! Again, these are things most people will neither know nor care about, but it all fits together in my mind, and it works as a cohesive world.
The other big location for the story, Mycroft’s manor house, required a slightly different approach. I knew I wanted it to be about an hour outside of London (without traffic). I found a site online that listed all the historic (“listed”) homes for each county. I went through them, clicking on each until I found something that ‘worked’ in my head visually. The place I found was larger than I’d imagined, but it worked with the general area and style of house. Again - not necessary, and the house could have been anything, anywhere, but it gave me a picture in my head as I told the story. Having pictures of it gave me an idea of the surrounding countryside as well.
So, what’s the takeaway from all this? I spend a lot of time location hunting. Would that time be better spent writing? Possibly. Is it something I care enough about to do anyway? Definitely. I’m not sure I’d recommend it; it can be crazy-making. But it’s fun.
Logistics, or "How Scrivener saved my sanity."
Some notes on the logistics of writing a 70,000 word story, and they’re all about Scrivener. (www.literatureandlatte.com) If you’re not using it, you’ll probably want to skip the rest of this as it’s very Scrivener-specific.
I’d been using the program for quite some time, but it wasn’t until I started writing this that I really delved into some of its more useful features. Perhaps the biggest change to my workflow was dividing each part of the story into scenes. Each scene takes place in a different time (or location) or from a different character’s point of view.
At first, I didn’t try to impose any artificial organisation (chapter breaks) onto the scenes; I just wrote them. Writing in such small chunks did help me plot out things a bit more than I normally would. I could take an idea, see the logical steps to get from Point A to Point B, create a scene from each one, then write the scenes. Scrivener is ideally set up for this and even has a “corkboard” mode where you can move scenes around and view summaries, keywords, status, and the like.
I’m not going to go into all the features of Scrivener. There are a lot, and it has quite a steep learning curve if you want to learn all of them. I suggest downloading the trial and going through their tutorial. It’ll help you get the basics.
Here are a few of the specific things I used.
I created “text documents” as scenes, organised under “folders” based on individual days in my storyline. This turned out to be a little problematic later in the process when I shifted from a timeline-based folder system to chapter-based folders. If I were to do it again, I’d group the scenes under general events. If I had a really firm idea of chapter breaks, I’d use those.
I used the “auto-generate synopsis from text” function to remind me what was in each scene. This way, I could see an overview of the scene in cork board mode.
I set up custom Labels to track different properties for the scenes. The main two were “Mycroft POV” and “Greg POV”. I applied “View->Use Label Colour in Binder” so I could see instantly whose point of view each scene was written from. In some cases, I realised I needed to combine two “scenes” into one because the next one was just a little further along in time and from the same POV.
Keywords were another interesting idea I hadn’t explored before. When you have 100+ scenes, it becomes vitally important to be able to find what you’re looking for. Sure, you could search on a word or two from the text—if you remember them—and hope it doesn’t turn up a bunch of hits, but this is far more efficient. Until I started with the keywords, I was relying on timeline date alone to quickly pinpoint and edit a scene. I knew something happened on the second Saturday, so I’d go to the “Second Saturday” folder (in reality, a “Week 2” folder with a “Saturday” subfolder) and find it there. However, as the timeline got longer and longer, this too became less tenable. (All of these subfolders are contained virtually within Scrivener—it’s all in one big file, able to be reshuffled at will.)
Someone wrote a fantastic Scrivener blog post about setting up and searching with keywords. You can find it here.
I set up keywords for Greg, Mycroft, minor characters, locations, topics (fire, medical and running), and writing tone (feels, humour, and sex).
So, once you have them all set up, you can do searches on them. First, set your search type in the upper left hand corner to “Keywords” and “All Words”. Then type in all the keywords you want to apply.
You can get really complex with your searches. For example, I could search on “Mycroft talking to Sherlock about Greg” by using my keywords “Sherlock Greg_mentioned Mycroft”. (This means that both Mycroft and Sherlock are present, and Greg is mentioned.)
On a much more basic level, you can use it to keep track of where you’ve mentioned minor characters. Simply searching on their name will bring up all their scenes. Of course, to do this, you need to keep up with your keywording, but it’s not difficult if you do it as you go along.
You might ask “Why bother? Why not just search on a word in the text?” Well, you could, but this allows you to do much more powerful searches based on character, location, character presence, and even writing tone. For example: “sex” gives us eight scenes, “sex gregs_flat” gives us one, and “sex feels” gives us two scenes where there is both angst and sexual content. When your file is 70,000 words long, it’s handy to be able to search through scenes efficiently.
I apologise for the long and rambling nature of these notes. I cut a bunch of them and they’re still long and rambling, so I’m just going to publish it or they’ll never see the light of day. Thanks for reading, and I hope you found something interesting.
Finally, I'd like to thank youcantsaymylastname for all her support while I wrote this fic. She talked me down from a lot of "But I don't know what they're going to do next" ledges and put up with countless email updates. I'm very grateful.
If you have questions about anything in here, feel free to send me an ask on tumblr.